Capturing experience

j 20, originally uploaded by crumplestiltskin.

So often a camera falls short of capturing beauty, because beauty isn’t just something you can see with your eyes. Beauty is an experience, a feeling, a state of mind, an everything. Photos can only represent a fraction of all that; a single dimension.

When I took photos of a sunrise in Jersey, I was surprised the visual beauty came through as well as it did. Yet however it may seem from the pictures, a viewer still can’t grasp exactly what it was like to be there.

The bitingly cold air, the sand muddy and dense like half-set concrete, dipping and bumping, wet feet, seagulls screaming, the smell of seaweed waking up, but most of all, the neverending panorama that even a fisheye lens can’t take in. 360 degrees of stones and sea and sand. Eyefuls of sky stretching out to everywhere. Two hours of chameleon clouds, rising from navy to blue, purple, pink, orange, gold, lemon, streaked with steely grey, blinding white sun breaking through. Not just the sky; the sand itself, wet and receptive, took on every colour like a folded inkblot, punctuated by rocks and lumps.

That 120-minute-long movement, where every colour changes imperceptibly every second, is impossible to record in a single shot. The smells, the feelings, the sounds; they’re complements to that image that now exist only in my mind and in my memory and that no amount of words can equal.

What I mean is, if these pictures look like 100% beauty, the reality was more like ten times that. These images may look beautiful, but nothing compares with actually being there and experiencing it. But equally, experiencing it is nothing unless you see the beauty in it.